Online Accounting
What is Online Accounting?
Our Online Accounting solution provides you with the freedom to access and work with your sales, stock and stock purchase information from anywhere in the world. The only infrastructure you need is access to the Internet through your firewall.
We provide the rest of the infrastructure including servers, backups, redundancy, and monitoring 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. You don't have to worry about remembering to take backups, or checking the validity of what has been backed up. We look after all of that for you!
Why use Online Accounting?
The primary reason for using our solution is the capabilities it provides to your organisation. If your business is involved in sales & distribution activity, then this solution is ideally suited to your needs.
Functionality
The functionality available ranges from simple data queries to an entire sales ledger that manages customers and assets from cradle to grave.
Availability
There are multiple layers of redundancy in telecommunications links; electricity supply; backups; and hardware. In fact, there are always spare servers on standby ready to be used in the event of a complete hardware failure. Could you afford to have spare servers sitting around for a system installed in your office?
Even if you were to lose your office building through fire, flood, or some other disaster, you could continue to operate your accounting system from any location with Internet access.
Systems Management
Your system is managed by experts who monitor it 24x7. They take care of all operations activity such as backups; operating system upgrades; anti-virus protection; and performance tuning.
Mobile Application Integration
Unlike most accounting systems, this application was built to transmit and receive information natively with mobile computing applications used by drivers, sales reps, warehouse personnel and service staff.
External Systems Integration
Just as it works to exchange information with mobile computing applications, our hosted accounting solution can also exchange information with third party applications thus ensuring the smoooth integration of orders, invoices and payments.
Cost
The solution is unusual in that you pay as you use it through a monthly subscription. Unlike traditional systems, you don't have to invest in a server infrastructure, or a maintenance contract to maintain it. As a result, whole layers of cost such as hardware and hardware maintenance are eliminated.
Standard Edition
This edition is used primarily to query transactions that have been recorded on mobile computing devices and passed to your back office system for processing.
Examples of transactions that can be queried include signed orders, PODs, and completed job tickets. These can be printed or sent to customers by email.
Business Edition
The Business Edition provides all of the query functionality available in the Standard Edition, but also provides all of the functions necessary to manage mobile activity.
Accounting functions are still performed by your back office system but this version of the solution is used to plug gaps in your back office systems for dealing with mobile computing devices.
Typical Functionality Used
Some back office systems have more features available than others, so not all functions listed here are needed. Only those that are required to support specific business needs are used, but all of them can be used if necessary:
- Assign/remove customers from journeys/routes
- Allocate information to handheld devices
- Report on route/journey activity
- Assign orders to journeys
- Activate/Deactivate devices and operators
- Maintain product barcodes
Enterprise Edition
This is a fully self-contained sales ledger that brings together functionality to help you manage the entire sales side of your business more efficiently.
It also features extensive functionality for managing roaming or fixed assets, as well as stock management and stock ordering. Information can be viewed from a variety of angles such as looking at all of the assets that have passed through a specific customer location.
Modules
The modules used depend on the nature of the client installation but can include:
- Customer - gathering all customer information together in a single view
- Order Processing - as well as standard product orders, other forms of order such as asset and service orders can be recorded
- Remote Order Processing - orders captured on mobile computing devices or via an interface (from a website, or electronically from a customer for example) can be processed just like orders input directly onto the system
- PODs - proof of delivery tickets can be recorded/uploaded from mobile computing devices or recorded manually
- Billing - the invoicing process is highly automated with a variety of invoicing options including transmitting invoices electronically to customers
- Receipt Processing - record and allocate multiple types of receipt including cheque, BACS, direct debit, and credit card
- Credit Control - a suite of tools to make the credit control process more efficient
- Pricing - many types of pricing structure are available to enable you customise your pricing for your customers
- Journey Assignment - manage all aspects of routes/journeys and distribution activity
- Fleet - maintain vehicle details from acquisition, through servicing, accident history and final disposal
- Stock - track and trace all stock activities both in warehouses and on vehicles
- Contracts - maintain contract details and generate rental/hire purchase/sales invoices automatically
- Assets - maintain histories of all activity associated with fixed or roaming assets
- Mobile Devices - manage field staff activity using mobile devices
- Contact Management - record interactions with customers/prospects and assign follow up actions
- Marketing Surveys - undertake surveys amongst customers/prospects on any aspect of your business and analyse the results to improve your operations
- Exception Notifications - receive automated notifications for events such as a piece of equipment being delivered that has not been returned from a previous hire, or a driver not logging in to their handheld by a specific time
- Reports - receive scheduled reports directly to your email inbox automatically or go online to run specific user-defined queries
- External Interfaces - exchange information with external systems including customers, suppliers, websites, and even equipment such as vending machines